Digital Health/Remote Health Applications for Self-management in Patients with Rheumatic Diseases

By Gaurav Bora 07 Jun 2022

Digital Health Applications for Rheumatic Diseases

Mobile Health (mHealth) technologies are transforming the quality and mode of healthcare by connecting the patients, their families, and other healthcare professionals by connecting a network through mobile and any other specialized devices like wearable sensors to record the health parameters and gathering the health-related data of the patients. Health information can be converted and transferred to physicians and other health care professionals using these innovative devices, which can help them monitor the patient data efficiently. mHealth allows patients to get more engaged and take the initiative of self-management and shared management of their health.

As described in the report by Palazzo et.al. (2014), around 17.3 million people worldwide have reported rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases (RMDs), the most recurring is the lower back pain and Osteoarthritis (OA). RMDs have multidimensional consequences on health, and the increasing options of availability of apps have an evaluative role in enabling people with RMDs to better self-management of their health. On the other side, different mHealth apps have been developed for different health conditions. Over the past few years, the availability of mobile health applications has grown exponentially, and so has the number of users. The role of these apps is to prevent the disease from developing among the healthy users as well as for people with long-term conditions including, but not limited to, rheumatic and musculoskeletal diseases (RMDs), cardiovascular diseases, respiratory diseases, and diabetes mellitus.

Features of Self-, Management Applications